


Blue Ocean Floor

by peacefultyranny



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Mentions of Violence, Merformers, Other, weird fish people doing the horizontal tango eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-20 17:21:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3658746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peacefultyranny/pseuds/peacefultyranny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drift/Wing mermaid au.</p>
<p>Drift, once a captive mer who performed for humans in exchange for food, suddenly finds himself alone and in a seapen far from any oceanarium's tank. Everything's new and scary and pretty horrifying for someone who's never seen a rock before, but everything is worth it when a rather beautiful mer shows up to greet him one day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pre-Hook

**Author's Note:**

> some quick notes:  
> drift has the rear end of an orca but otherwise is pretty human-y, barring a few key differences. his dorsal fin has a pretty wicked curve to it, but since i imagine mer would do at least a little better than a fully grown orca in similarly-sized tanks it isn't completely bent like a real captive orca's would be.  
> wing has a pretty sailfish butt but he isn't in this chapter so you don't get to hear about drift oogling him. enjoy that anticipation

The first thing he noticed was that the water was _weird_. It was murky and dark and cool against his skin, and he didn't tingle-itch and his eyes didn't burn a little when he opened them, and as far as he could see, he wasn't surrounded by too-blue walls that reflected light and sound to keep him partially blind in both senses. The second thing that he noticed was that it was both quiet and loud all at once – not the horrible echoing loudness of music pounding through speakers held over the water or hundreds of screaming humans or the banging of small fists on glass, but instead a sort of long, distant rolling of water on water on water, more water moving all at once than he could ever recall hearing. He'd been half-asleep when they raised him out of the seacan, but he had gotten a fuzzy, sleepy view of water as far as the eye can see, rolling like millions of mer were jumping and splashing and sloshing the water about.

Here now, though, all he could see was cloudy blue-green seawater, salt coating his tongue rather than harsh chlorine, and he could hear the quiet returning echo of some sort of thin, loosely woven wire on all sides around him except up and down. Up, of course, was the surface (he could see the sun glinting off the rippling skin above him, since the water was much clearer farther up), and down was impossible to see with his eyes through the murk, but after a series of short clicks he picked up a strange soft ground that rippled like the water's surface above him, and irregular hard things jutting out of the softer ground.

He was just about to head downwards to investigate when a sharp whistle echoed through the water. That, at least, was familiar, and he quickly popped up on the surface with the usual mixture of dread and anticipation; whistles meant food, but they also usually meant he had to do something ridiculous to get it, and he was still too groggy and disoriented to put up with that. Finding who had blown the whistle was easy enough at least: a slight human with short cropped, messy hair in a black and blue wetsuit and a metal tube in its mouth was crouched on the edge of the platform that presumably was holding up the weird wire walls of his new tank and, more importantly, the silver bucket behind him.

He swam up quickly and came to a stop just a foot from the lip of the platform, carefully wading using his tail and hands to keep his head and shoulders above the water. The human smiled at him and pat his head gently before it reached behind itself and pulled out a small fish from the bucket. Drift opened his mouth immediately and caught the fish as it was tossed to him with his teeth, his hands coming up to hold the fish while he tore off the tail and fins; swallowing a fish whole is easy enough, but the fins hurt his throat and he avoided eating them if he could, which wasn't often considering how rarely anyone got fed outside of shows. Humans were oddly picky about fish tails littering the tanks.

“Hey buddy,” the human says in its slow, deep speech, smiling as it drops the whistle from its blunt teeth to rest on its chest on the rope tied around its neck. It rubbed one of its thumbs down the thin ridge of fat that ran from forehead down the centre of his face – somewhat similar to a nose, only without the nostrils or general need to breathe air and instead used to channel sonar pulses more precisely through the water – and he lidded his eyes, enjoying the attention. “Enjoying your new home so far?”

Drift chirpped, less genuine language and more a vague confused note, and gave the human a confused look before glancing around. The crane that had lifted him into the pool was gone, which implied that he was here for at least a fairly decent chunk of time. This certainly like any of the tanks he'd ever been to, though, and for something like this to be called home was...weird. “Are more mer here? Going to?” he asked, scrunching up his face as he tried to speak the much slower language, “More human?”

The human shook its head and pulled another fish from the bucket, which Drift promptly devoured. “Nope, just you here. Some humans will come and go, but nothing like before. It's gonna be nice and quiet for you for a while,” It handed him another fish, which he ate a little slower as he parsed the information. When he finished, the human picked up the metal tube and held it up near its mouth, smiling down at him. “Think you're up for a little stretching? Nothing too fancy though, just enough to get that cramped seacan feel out.”

 

* * *

 

None of the tricks he ended up doing over the next several weeks were anything 'too fancy' by show standards, which was a relief, but instead the humans slowly started only giving him fish if he did something brand new. That was a royal piss-off. Before, he only got fed if he did the exact trick a specific gesture told him to do, and now they were just waving their arms wildly and expecting him to make up something new and exciting on the spot, and he was coping poorly with the change. He didn't enjoy doing the tricks and things in the first place, and now they were making the experience that much worse; he wasn't exactly known for his creativity when it came to jumping out of the water.

It also didn't help that sometimes instead of fish they were handing him weird chunks and expecting him to eat it. He let it sink to the bottom when they tossed it in every time and gave them a sour look until they gave him something that was actually food, which they seemed oddly reluctant to do even if he did something they all seemed to really enjoy.

“This is food, you know,” one of the trainers told him one day, holding one of the weird chunks out for Drift to investigate. He snorted – or imitated a snort by pushing air out the gills on his throat just beneath the water, something some humans found weirdly amusing – and poked at the chunk with a disgusted look on his face. The human sighed and tore a tiny piece of it off, looking thoroughly grossed out itself, and held it close to the mer's mouth. “Wild mer eat this sometimes, too.”

Drift's eyes widened considerably – wild mer were something he'd only started hearing about recently, about how they didn't live in the tiny too-blue tanks in tight groups but instead swam out in the endless amount of water that stretched on without stopping for as long as he could see and hear. He tentatively leaned forward and caught the tiny piece of food between his teeth and, after hesitating with it dangling in his teeth for a moment, tossed it deeper in his mouth with a flick of his head.

It was...good. It was _really_ good. He looked up at the human and chirped expectantly: more of that, please!

The human just laughed and handed him the rest of the meat, and Drift quickly pulled it from its hands and sunk underwater to enjoy it in peace.

 

* * *

 

It took surprisingly little time for him to get used to the weird food and weird tank in the end, even if fish swam ( _swam!_ ) through sometimes, darting off before he could get a good look at them. He actually started to enjoy it a little, though the fact that he was completely alone aside from humans was a sort of mixed blessing that put a damper on the whole situation.

Mer were extremely social creatures and needed company to be truly healthy and thrive, which meant putting a bunch in a small space was good in theory...until you messed with their social structure. Different mer had completely different societies and languages, and while generally friendly towards mer from similar regions, throwing in mer from around the world and forcing them to stick together sort of ended poorly. Very poorly. Drift was covered in a wide variety of rakes and scars and could attest to just how poorly mer got along in the tanks.

Getting beat up constantly didn't really kill a mer's need for physical affection, though, and while humans were more than happy to give him pets and scratches, it wasn't quite what he needed. Honestly, half the time he didn't even know what he needed, but humans couldn't give it to him and it left him antsy and frustrated. When the humans noticed that he'd started chewing on the edges of the platform surrounding his pen in frustration, they'd all gathered around and mumbled in their weird deep voices just out of range for Drift to understand them.

Not that he particularly needed to, since a few days later there was a low roar and a fast chopping noise that signalled the approach of a boat – a boat that was arriving at distinctly the wrong time for most of the humans to head to _wherever_ they did when not around his pen and stopped on the opposite side of the pen from where it usually did. One of the trainers whistled him over for pets, and he squawked and thrashed when another human clamped something heavy over the base of his drooping dorsal fin. He spat curses and rolled violently, hands scrabbling at his back and trying to peel the weird boxy object off himself, much to the distress of all the humans around him.

It took them several minutes to calm him down, although their explanation that it was a tracking device didn't really help in _keeping_ him calm. He sank down until just his eyes were above the water and glowered at the humans, only perking up when the platform somehow split apart and opened up, creating a path for him to leave the pen. He hesitated for a moment, looking up at the various humans around him for assurance, and when no one objected he shot off out of the tiny pen and into the open ocean, the roar of the boat just behind him.

At least now the tracking device made sense, with nothing but open water around him for a greater distance than he had a concept of measuring.


	2. Hook(ed)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> super inspired to write this au so here's hoping i can keep the writing thing full-throttle for a bit before i do that thing where i forget about chaptered fics  
> hoopefully the chapters should get a little longer after this. introductory chapters are hard. next time i decide to do this hit me and tell me to just write pwp  
> there's art of mer!drift at the end of this chapter done by yours truely! ill get a picture of wing out in time for the next chapter and stuff it in there too

He hadn't actually managed to get very far in the end, the trees along the coast still distinct to his eyes in the slowly dimming sunlight, before a sharp, high whistle sounded from the boat, signalling him to come back. He was thankful when he was tossed a chunk of meat to occupy himself with while the boat swung around, and on the way back he rode its bow wake to conserve his flagging energy.

There was a _lot_ more water out here than in the tanks.

The humans ended up taking him out on more 'walks' after that – not every day, much to his displeasure, but they seemed to try to make up for it by throwing him new things to mess with on the off days – and they did a fantastic job of keeping him occupied. It was hard to be antsy and bored and frustrated out in the open ocean with no one to tell him what to do or what he couldn't do or to choose who he had to spend time with.

The open ocean was _incredible_. Just outside the secondary set of wiring strung up around a larger portion of the small cove the seafloor seemed to just disappear, dropping off into darker water than Drift had ever seen. He'd spent almost a whole day once trying to get deep enough to see where it bottomed out again, but the pressure made his head swim and chest hurt long before he could hear anything. After that, he chose to swim along the coasts, sometimes breaking away from the boat to chase schools of fish (something he'd figured out were actually _edible_ , and were way better than the dead fish he usually ate) or to poke at the strange, sharp creatures that clung to rocks in the shallows, or he'd head straight out to sea and try to see how far he could make it before the sun set and the boat headed back.

Eventually, the humans stopped pulling the smaller enclosure shut when they returned from the walks, instead letting him poke around the entirety of the closed-off cove. It had several upsides, like more free space for him to move around in than thirty of the pools he'd been in (maybe more, he still wasn't judging distance very well), but also came with a few downsides: no more food hand-outs, forcing him to find food on his own (which is hard when you're brilliant white and red and live fish are decidedly not blind), and a significant lack of “ _enrichment devices_ ”. It wasn't too hard to find something to occupy himself with in the relatively huge cove at least, and it wasn't like the humans left him completely alone now, but it was still a change.

He hated change.

It was actually one of the days the humans were in the water with him, six of them draping themselves over his back to weigh him down and force him to work hard to keep them all above the water, when he caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye.

Drift whipped his head around to see what it was, only to see a few bubbles bursting on the surface. He was just about to pass it off as nothing and look away when a shock of hair – white, short cut and plastered down from the water and with a thick read stripe down the centre, although with the amount of red there it might be more like _red_ hair lined by a pair of _white_ stripes – and eyes bright and golden enough to be seen from a distance popped up on the other side of the buoys holding up the wiring, the rest of their face hidden underwater still. Drift's entire body tensed, fins lining the sides of his head slowly raising, and both he and the other mer remained absolutely motionless for a few seconds simply staring at each other.

That was until the humans finally noticed something was up and they all turned their heads to see what Drift was staring at.

In a brilliant flash of opalescent white scales, the other mer turned tail and fled. Drift remained frozen for another solid minute before he wiggled his way out of the pile of humans and dove underwater, swimming for the 'wall' of his enclosure. Looping his webbed fingers through the loose weave, he pinged as far as he could, but whoever that mer was, they were _fast_ ; the only hint that anyone had been there at all was several pieces of kelp still caught in the eddying water.

 

* * *

 

 

Drift didn't rest too easy that night, frustrated and upset as he was, logging at the surface like he used to back when he was in the tanks and there wasn't anything else to do but float listlessly. He kept thinking himself in circles, caught between a desire to see someone, anyone, so long as they were mer, and his deep-seated and well-earned mistrust of everyone and anything. He shouldn't want to be around someone who was likely to just hurt him or piss him off into hurting them, but he needed the contact bad enough that it ached, burning a hole in his throat like he was choking on chlorine.

_Other mer are bad news_ , he thought, absently pressing his fingers with their blunted claws to one of the deep rake marks in his abdomen, _but anything is better than humans_.

He was roused from his brooding by a quiet ping of sonar bouncing off him and a soft chirp that was definitely not one of the local porpoise pods. Curious, he rolled from belly-up and slowly approached the wire at the edge of his cove not-quite straight on, ready to either fight or flee if he needed to. At the wiring though is the white mer from before – white and red and gold, Drift noted, with a long, thin tail that was more fish-like than his own and designed to move side-to-side rather than up and down, and fairly large fins lining either side of his face – looking, weirdly enough, relieved to see him.

“Oh, thank goodness you're still here,” he said, voice soft and pretty, “I was worried they'd have taken you out by now. Here, I'll help you escape.” Drift blinked, confused and missing half the words the other mer said (what language was he speaking?), but the other mer's meaning becomes pretty clear when he produced what looked to be a rusting human knife from a strip of cloth looped over his shoulder and started sawing at the wiring.

“The hell're you doing?” Drift barked, lunging forward and yanking the thin material from his hands. One of the pieces snapped, and he cursed quietly; if the humans found out, they might be mad. They really hadn't liked him chewing at the wiring in the smaller enclosure before.

The opalescent mer gave him a confused look and reached for the wire again, which Drift immediately yanked closer to himself. “I'm cutting a hole in the net to let you out,” he says slowly, “The humans aren't going to keep you in there forever. Didn't they already haul out the rest of your pod?”

Now it was Drift's turn for a confused look. “I don't got a pod. I'm alone, 'n the humans put me here, they're not gonna take me out.”

“Yes, the humans captured you and put you here, but then they'll pull you out and take you away! You'll never see the ocean again,” The stranger reached for the wiring – _net_ , apparently – again, and Drift popped his jaw threateningly, snapping his teeth at the shining white fingers. “I'm trying to help you!”

“I wasn't captured!” he shouted, which stunned the other mer long enough to stop him from trying to pry his fingers off the net, “Humans put me in here. I'm not even from the ocean,” He worked his jaw glaring, and debated on just how much would be safe to tell a stranger he could only half-understand. “If I'm not in here, I die.”

The mer finally pulled his hands back and gave Drift a long, hard look, before he slicked his cheek fins back and stuffed the knife back in his sling. He ran his fingers through the short, wavy mess of hair on his head, and the captive mer couldn't help but be amused at how upset he looked at having his great rescue plan blow up in his face. _Serves him right, trying to be a hero_.

They floated in uncomfortable silence for several minutes, the strange mer playing with his hands and Drift sizing him up. With a tail fin like that, he was probably built for speed, but the distinct – albeit wiry – muscles he had on his arms implied that he was a lot stronger than his thin build implied. Something Drift could identify with, even if he was larger than this particular mer he still didn't look particularly built, per-se, which was often the downfall of a lot of captive mer who thought he'd be nice and easy to take their boredom out on.

“I'm sorry,” The other mer said finally, making Drift blink and flick his facial fins in surprise. “I shouldn't have rushed in like that. I saw those humans on you earlier and I....I shouldn't have assumed,” Large golden eyes met blue, and Drift realized just how pretty that colour was close up. “Let's start over. I'm Wing.”

Drift looked down at the hand the other mer had held out while speaking, clearly intending on doing...something, and pointedly crossed his arms over his chest. “Drift,” he said, answering the unasked question.

“Drift,” Wing repeated, smiling at him even as he dropped his arm back to his side, “Nice to meet you.”

 

* * *

 

 

_[i[mage post and information on the design](http://peacefultyranny.tumblr.com/post/115261714271/heres-some-fishbutts-for-my-fun-merformers-au-im)]_

 


End file.
